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eater
8 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Suddenly, Ubuntu Dropbox wants authentication and won't start
I've been running Dropbox on my Ubuntu 18.04 desktop just fine for months. Today, I noticed the application had stopped, so I tried to start it again and it said "Authentication is needed to run '/bi...
- 7 years ago
Hi Emanuele P.1. I went back and forth with the Dropbox engineering team for two months with no solution. Then I finally just randomly on my own tried removing the 10 or so symlinks that happened to be in my Dropbox directories, and that made it all start working normally again.
I see Lusil gave you that suggestion, so maybe my experience has now made it into the Dropbox manual.
Hope that helps!
eater
7 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Hi Emanuele P.1. I went back and forth with the Dropbox engineering team for two months with no solution. Then I finally just randomly on my own tried removing the 10 or so symlinks that happened to be in my Dropbox directories, and that made it all start working normally again.
I see Lusil gave you that suggestion, so maybe my experience has now made it into the Dropbox manual.
Hope that helps!
Emanuele P.1
7 years agoExplorer | Level 4
Thanks eater, I will try the same then! It's very likely that I had moved some symlinks in the Dropbox folder just before.
- ceebeelee7 years agoNew member | Level 2
I had this too, under Ubuntu 18.10. I tried uninstalling/purging nautilius-dropbox and reinstalling from their web site. I tried deleting symlinks in ~/Dropbox. (both of these are solutions listed elsewhere). Neither helped. The following solved the problem for me:
I noticed that in the terminal used for `dropbox start`, dropbox was telling me what to do. It says:
Please run "echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p" and restart Dropbox to fix the problem.
So I did that, and it fixed the problem for me.
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